Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1

[182] Convention. If you allow yourselves to be diverted from. the exercise of the power by such technicalities, you forget the very purpose for which it was given, and practically annihilate it.

It is not true, then, as Mr. Loring claims, that, when he received his commission, “no objection was made by the Executive of the Commonwealth, or of any other branch of the government, to his further discharge of the duties of a Commissioner,” --meaning the duty of catching slaves. The statute of 1843, then in full force and effect, was clear and official notice to him what “objection” the Commonwealth had to the returning of slaves.

But it is said the statute was passed in 1843, and only prohibited officers from acting under the slave act of 1793 it cannot have any reference to the slave act of 1850, since this was not in existence in 1843, and Mr. Loring's action in the Burns case was under the act of 1850.

This is another technical evasion, but not as good even as the first; because, in the Sims case, (7 Cushing, 285,) which Mr. Loring cites, Judge Shaw holds the act of 1850 constitutional, because it is so precisely like the act of 1793; and Mr. Loring, in his Burns judgment, takes the same view. Now, if the two acts are so precisely alike that the constitutionality of one proves the constitutionality of the other, then they are such twins as to be both within the meaning and intent of our statute of 1843.

When the counsel of Sims and Burns wished to argue the unconstitutionality of the act of 1850, on the ground that it went far beyond anything judicially recognized in the act of 1793, then Judges Shaw and Loring find the two acts so much alike that the argument is unnecessary. When Mr. Loring's friends would defend him, then these two acts are so different, that our law of 1843 can apply only to the first! To plunge an innocent and free man like Burns into slavery, against law and evidence, these statutes